Ada McMahon's blog

On May Day in New Orleans, immigrants and their supporters marched for just immigration reform and an end to deportations.

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Where are you from, originally? This simple question was the topic of a discussion at Community Book Center in New Orleans last week, and prompted a sweeping conversation about race, class, displacement, and what it means to be from this rapidly changing city with deep roots. [...Read more]

Three years since the Deepwater Horizon explosion in the Gulf of Mexico set off the worst oil disaster in United States history, BP Chief Bob Dudley says everything is fine in the Gulf of Mexico. [...Read more]

If you want to get a sense of what the Keystone XL pipeline would do to Gulf Coast communities (and which communities will bear the brunt of refining 830,000 barrels of tar sands oil a day), look no further than Manchester, a neighborhood in Houston’s East End. [...Read more]

A delegation of Filipino groups from across the country visited Louisiana this weekend to show solidarity with a local labor struggle against the oil industry, with national and international implications. A group of former workers at Grand Isle Shipyard (GIS), all guestworkers from the Philippines, have filed a class action lawsuit against the oil company for a range of labor abuses. [...Read more]

Three BP oil disaster survivors and community advocates were forcibly removed from the fairness hearing on the BP class-action settlement yesterday, moments before the federal court heard objections to how that settlement would compensate people made sick by the disaster. The fairness hearing allowed U.S. [...Read more]

As a woman with disabilities – she has cerebral palsy and requires the assistance of personal care attendants to live an independent life – Ashley Volion is no stranger to isolation and discrimination. But as she wrote on Bridge The Gulf yesterday, nothing hurt this 28-year old academic from Lafitte, Louisiana as much as having to defer pursuing a Ph.D. [...Read more]

Last week, Sharon Hanshaw represented Biloxi, Mississippi and women across the Gulf Coast in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Sharon spoke about how her experience after Hurricane Katrina led her to advocacy and to addressing climate change on a local and global scale. [...Read more]

For most people in Louisiana, cracking the shell off a crawfish, sucking the head, and swallowing the tail meat is a joyous part of what it means to call this place home. But peeling crawfish is not so fun for guestworkers from Mexico, who allege that they are facing slave-like conditions in a Louisiana plant. [...Read more]

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